Showing posts with label RIP. Show all posts
Showing posts with label RIP. Show all posts

Saturday, December 06, 2008

Forrest J. Ackerman RIP

Forry Ackerman the father of 'Sci-Fi' and Famous Monsters of Movieland died yesterday. When I learned this I said to a friend wow I thought he had passed away years ago. At least he had as a pop culture icon of fantasy, sci-fi and movie monsterdom. He was relagatedto occasional apperances in cheesy B sci fi and monster movies, which he loved, while the fickel world of pop culture popularity replaced him with George Lucas, Stephen Spielberg, Harry Potter and Tolkien.
One thing I learned from this LA Times obituary bio was that he was a closet lesbian. Which makes alot of sense, Hollywood where he grew up was always a kinky place and science fiction was place where homosexuality was one of the speculative fictions.
And the science fiction community known as 'fandom' was always a fringe community, begining in its earliest days as pulp fiction, it was based on readers and writers who cooresponded with each other, in doing so they linked to other fringe groups, and movements, some of them in their embryonic forms; feminism, occultists, conspiracy theorists, socialists,beatniks, hippies, homosexuals, etc. etc. It was not limited to the United States. Fandom was populated by the original geeks and nerds who read wild tales of imaginary worlds. In doing so they helped create the counter culture of the fifties and sixties. And in LA they created links between sci fi and libertarian politics as well as the feminist, homosexual and occult community. And no one was more of a geek than Forry.

By his late teens, he had mastered Esperanto, the invented international language. In 1929, he founded the Boys Scientifiction Club. In 1932, he joined a group of other young fans in launching the Time Traveler, which is considered the first fan magazine devoted exclusively to science fiction and for which Ackerman was "contributing editor." Ackerman also joined with other local fans in starting a chapter of the Science Fiction Society -- meetings were held in Clifton's Cafeteria in downtown L.A. -- and as editor of the group's fan publication Imagination!, he published in 1938 a young Ray Bradbury's first short story. During World War II, Ackerman edited a military newspaper published at Ft. MacArthur in San Pedro. After the war, he worked as a literary agent. His agency represented scores of science-fiction writers, including L. Ron Hubbard, Isaac Asimov, A.E. van Vogt, H.L. Gold, Ray Cummings and Hugo Gernsback. In 1954, Ackerman coined the term that would become part of the popular lexicon -- a term said to make some fans cringe. My wife and I were listening to the radio, and when someone said 'hi-fi' the word 'sci-fi' suddenly hit me," Ackerman explained to The Times in 1982. "If my interest had been soap operas, I guess it would have been 'cry-fi,' or James Bond, 'spy-fi.' " At the time, Ackerman already was well-known among science-fiction and horror aficionados for his massive collection. After a couple from Texas showed up on his doorstep in 1951 asking to view the collection, Ackerman began opening up his home for regular, informal tours on Saturdays. Over the years, thousands of people made the pilgrimage to the Ackermansion. He also wrote what has been reported to be the first lesbian science-fiction story ever published, "World of Loneliness." And under the pen name Laurajean Ermayne, he wrote lesbian romances in the late 1940s for the lesbian magazine Vice Versa.





SEE:

Childhoods End

RAW RIP

Vonnegut, Dresden and Canada

Lily Munster RIP

Grandpa Munster RIP

Van Allen Belt

LEM RIP

Octavia Butler RIP

New Age Libertarian Manifesto

Heinlein Centennial

The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress

Andre Norton 1912-2005

Lagrange 5

Good Morning Dave

Another Character Generator




Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,, , , , , , , ,






Thursday, November 06, 2008

Working Class Hero; Studs Terkel RIP

If E.P. Thompson gave voice to a new form of labour history; social history of the peoples struggles, history of the forgotten, with his Making of the English Working Class, American popular social hisorian Studs Terkel gave it voice through his interviews which were broadcast on radio and later published as books. Studs was as much a Marxist as Thompson, and both gave birth to the new labour history.

After being investigated by Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1953, his contract was cancelled. Terkel refused to give evidence against other left-wing activists and was therefore blacklisted and prevented from appearing on television. He later recalled: "I was blacklisted because I took certain positions on things and never retracted... I signed many petitions that were for unfashionable causes and never retracted."


Studs passed away on Halloween. His passing was noted in the press but they quickly moved on to history in the making; the U.S. Presidential election. An election that used terms not heard for over sixty years; working class, socialism, communism, marxism, depression. Studs wrote on American working class culture with his book Working and on the stories of the Great Depression. The irony of the current crash of the market which he warned about back during the Reagan revolution would not be lost on him.

When Terkel's 1970 oral history of the 1930s Depression, "Hard Times,'' was reissued in 1986 in the heart of the Reagan administration, Terkel's new introduction worked strenuously to show how the two eras were comparably nightmarish - though the 1980s never had anything like the 25 percent unemployment of the earlier era. Terkel writes: "In the '30s, an administration recognized a need and lent a hand. Today an administration recognizes an image and lends a smile.'' Part of Terkel's wide appeal was that he seemed to be a scrappy liberal in his choice of causes and concerns, but look more closely and it becomes less clear where his liberalism slips into radicalism. Though Terkel was not a theorist, nearly every one of the positions approvingly intimated by him seem to fit models shaped by Marxist theory; he even wore something red every day to affirm his attachment to the working class.

The most admired are those who, because of personal gifts, transcend the monotony of working life; the most respected are those who come to recognize those horrors most clearly and speak of them. The interviews fit the intellectual framework set up by the “Working” introduction: “This book, being about work, is, by its very nature, about violence — to the spirit as well as to the body.” That means it includes, in Mr. Terkel’s list, ulcers, accidents, shouting matches, fistfights, nervous breakdowns, daily humiliations and “scars, psychic as well as physical.” There are some, he says, who may enjoy their work, but these cases may “tell us more about the person than about his task.” He seems to cheer the questioning of the “work ethic,” though he himself clearly relished it and relied upon it.
This vision of work, though, is an obvious translation of a traditional Marxist view of the alienation of labor — the sense of disassociation that comes from the capitalist workplace. The most transformative accomplishment would be to recognize the causes of that alienation, because that would help usher in a new world; this is what Mr. Terkel seems to cherish in his most admired laborers and what he hopes to accomplish in the book itself


Being a Chicagoan he would have appreciated that home boy Obama won the election using the strategies and tactics of his old pal Saul Alinsky another Chicago radical.

Brian Viner: A shame that Studs Terkel didn't live to see Obama win

And he documented that great racial divide that Obama overcame this week.

Terkel, who was often praised as the consummate listener, didn't just arrive at someone's front door and say, "Tell me about yourself." He carried on a conversation. Terkel didn't let people off the hook. In Division Street, a 19-year-old man who had left the hills of Kentucky for Chicago talks about his fear of living too close to blacks. "It doesn't bother me," he says, "as long as they stay on their side of the street." To which Terkel asks, "Suppose they're on the same side of the street?" You can almost hear the young man consider this for a moment before laughing at himself. "I imagine we might be able to be pious and get along pretty good," he replies. That was Terkel. His effervescence brought out the best in virtually everyone he encountered. His books brought out the best in America

In fact Obama's appeal to the broad base of America to recognize itself in his story was very much based on Studs giving voice to America. In fact Obama's campaign theme of hope was influenced by Studs 'radical optimism', even if it never credited him.

"I've always felt, in all my books, that there's a deep decency in the American people and a native intelligence—providing they have the facts, providing they have the information."
"With optimism, you look upon the sunny side of things. People say, 'Studs, you're an optimist.' I never said I was an optimist. I have hope because what's the alternative to hope? Despair? If you have despair, you might as well put your head in the oven."


And Studs was not one to shy away from controversy in fact he defended fellow Chicgoa activist William Ayers of the Weather Underground. His support for fellow radicals was longstanding.

Mr. Terkel also provided a blurb for the memoirs of William Ayers, the Weatherman bomber whose connection with Barack Obama has been a point of controversy. “A deeply moving elegy to all those young dreamers who tried to live decently in an indecent world,” Mr. Terkel wrote. “Ayers provides a tribute to those better angels of ourselves.”

My last encounter with Studs might give Sarah Palin chills, or at least campaign fodder. It was a couple of years ago at the Studs Terkel Community Media Awards dinner, sponsored by Community Media Workshop. Bill Ayers wasn't there, but his wife and Weather Underground comrade Bernadine Dohrn was. Little did I realize I was "palling around with domestic terrorists" that night.

Mr. Ayers is married to Bernardine Dohrn,another Weather Underground figure. Both were indicted in 1970 for inciting to riot and conspiracy to bomb government buildings, but charges were dropped in 1974 because of prosecutorial misconduct, including illegal surveillance.

And with his usual humourous aplomb and indeaftable optimism and cutting wit he wrote his own epitaph.

He was in that living room last year when he said with zest that when he "checked out"--as a "hotel kid" he rarely used the word "dying," preferring the euphemism "checking out" and its variants--he wanted to be cremated. He wanted his ashes mixed with those of his wife, which sat in an urn in the living room of his house, near the bed in which he slept and dreamed."My epitaph? My epitaph will be, 'Curiosity did not kill this cat,'." he said.He then said that he wanted his and Ida's ashes to be scattered in Bughouse Square, that patch of green park that so informed his first years in his adopted city."Scatter us there," he said, a gleeful grin on his face. "It's against the law. Let 'em sue us."

SEE:

Gay Old Communists

American Proletarian Republicanism

Hobsbawm Historical Revisionist

Tick, Tock, We Live By The Clock

Tyrant Time-Tempus Fug'it

Tags; , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,








Sunday, May 25, 2008

Don't Mourn Organize

The Greatest Wobbly folk singer and hobo since Joe Hill has taken the last train out of the station.

Bruce 'U' Utah Phillips has passed away late Friday night. We mourn his passing, a great Wobbly who kept wobbly culture alive through many a dark night when the organization was a mere memory of its past glory. By keeping our wobbly culture of song, and activism alive the spirit of the organization continued on inspiring a whole new generation of activists to become wobs.

As Joe Hill admonished his comrades on his passing; Don't Mourn boys, organize, the same holds true for our fallen comrade and wobbly hobo; Utah Phillips.

The IWW is strong and growing in no small part thanks to the dedication and perseverance of Utah.

U. Utah Phillips has passed away in his sleep at 11:30PM PDT on May 23, 2008.

Born Bruce Duncan Phillips on May 15, 1935 in Cleveland, Ohio, he was the son of labor organizers. Whether through this early influence or an early life that was not always tranquil or easy, by his twenties Phillips demonstrated a lifelong concern with the living conditions of working people. He was a proud member of the Industrial Workers of the World, popularly known as "the Wobblies," an organizational artifact of early twentieth-century labor struggles that has seen renewed interest and growth in membership in the last decade, not in small part due to his efforts to popularize it.

Phillips' other survivors include another son and a daughter, several stepchildren, brothers and sisters and a grandchild. The family requests memorial donations go to Hospitality House, a homeless shelter founded by Phillips in Grass Valley, Calif. Additional information is available at www.hospitalityhouseshelter.org.






SEE:


Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
, , , , , , , , , ,

Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Albert Hoffman RIP

The image “http://nepenthes.lycaeum.org/People/Images/hofmann.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann, who in 1943 accidentally discovered the hallucinogenic effects of Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), has died at the age of 102, Reuters reports.


102 years old...proving that old adage; 'Better Living Through Chemistry'. Good night Dr. Hoffman you have enriched all our lives.


Tags



Saturday, January 19, 2008

Bobby and Howard

There is a passing similarity between the decent into madness of social isolation that Bobby Fischer suffered and the decent into madness of social isolation that affected Howard Hughes. Given time perhaps Martin Scorsese will make a movie about this Brooklyn kid. He remained Bobby through out his life, never Robert. Perhaps his madness was that of never really growing up after having grown up too soon.

Or perhaps his paranoia was justified,given how he went from Red Diaper Baby to American Chess ChampionWho Defeats The Reds.


For it turns out from now declassified FBI files that Bobby’s biological parents, Paul Lemenyi and Regina Fischer (née Wender), were for many years spied on by the federal government, which feared they had pro-Soviet sympathies. Her husband, Gerhardt Fischer, whom she divorced in 1945 when Bobby was 2 years old, had in 1939 been permanently barred from entering the United States on account of his suspected Commie sympathies, and according to the FBI never did so. Short of also being possessed of magical powers of impregnation by a process of thought or telepathy, he could therefore not have fathered young Bobby.


His paranoia was the same as that of the culture of Cold War America in which he grew up. A paranoid culture of the American Military Industrial Complex which also impacted on Howard Hughes. And it is a culture that continues today Post 9/11.That Bobby Fischer like Hughes saw conspiracies running the Chess World and then America even if he mistook the source, is understandable.

Unfortunately his criticism of the Israel US domination of the Middle East was tainted by his own self loathing of being Jewish and by holocaust denial in effect the denial of his own parentage and heritage.

Such social schizophrenia resulted in a very personal madness of social isolation. He went from Cold War Prodigy to Social Pariah in a few short years resulting in his further break down. As a result he is another victim of the emotional plague.

Influenced as he was by the Cold War propaganda of American Culture such social schizophrenia is understandable, it still exists today on the right. A right which sees Bolshevism and Communism as a Jewish conspiracy and even attributes that same conspiracy to the development of the anti-communist/anti-Stalinist neo-con movement of the Sixties being that it was made up of former leftists from the New York Jewish intellectual circles.





BOBBY FISCHER: 1943-2008

By the end of his life his eccentricity and paranoia had come to overshadow his achievement.

Even in his strange exile from the chess scene, however, Fischer continued to haunt it. He became the Howard Hughes of chess, with fans eager for his return reporting sightings at tournaments and continuing to analyze his games years after other champions had taken his place.


On the day after Bobby Fischer’s death it was clear that Icelanders felt they had lost a friend. Many had grown accustomed to seeing this bearded man in central Reykjavík. Even though he was a very private man who kept to himself it is clear that he had a small group of very good friends. Those remembered him yesterday with fondness even though they made it clear that he had been very difficult at times.

Remembering Bobby Fischer, chess's Cold War warrior

An Appreciation From an Heir

Q: What was Mr. Fischer’s place in chess history?

Mr. Kasparov: Definitely, Fischer’s contribution was the most revolutionary. He made chess more professional in terms of overall chess strategy and proper education in chess, in bringing everything he had into the game.

Q: What do you mean?

A: He exhausted himself, his opponent and all the resources at the chess board. He was a real fighter, at a time when short draws were often agreed. Fischer was unstoppable. They [other top players] had nothing to offer to conquer his dedication to the game. He also added an element of psychological warfare.

Q: Did he influence your career?

A: I was seven, eight, nine in the early 1970s. We didn’t know much about the Cold War, of Fischer being the symbol of individualism and freedom fighting the great Soviet machine. Only later when I worked on [writing the book] “My Great Predecessors” did I realize the full impact of the Fischer revolution. He was a unique combination of a great researcher and fierce fighter and great chess player — a man with tremendous chess capacity.


Excerpts from Associated Press coverage of the Bobby Fischer-Boris Spassky Match of the Century in 1972


Chesstest
Fischer-Spassky, 1972, Game 6

Click on the diagram to replay a crucial game from the tournament.

After losing the first game and forfeiting the second, Bobby Fischer had stormed back to tie the match after five games. In Game 6, he played an opening he had never played before, and in which Boris Spassky had never lost. In a masterful display, Mr. Fischer pushed Mr. Spassky off the board, took the lead in the match and never looked back.


Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
,, , , Cold War,, ,

Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Robert Goulet RIP

Robert Goulet, `Camelot' Star, Dapper Singer, Dead at Age 73

He was born in the U.S. but raised here in Edmonton. His official website is down due to the excess attempts to access it.

In spite of his stage fright, Goulet was encouraged by his parents to continue performing. When he was in his early teens, his recently widowed mother moved herself and her son from Girouxville, Alberta, to the provincial capital of Edmonton so that he could take advantage of the performance opportunities offered in the city. There, he attended the famous voice schools founded by Herbert G. Turner and Jean Letourneau, and later became a radio announcer for radio station CKUA. Upon graduating from high school, Goulet received a scholarship to Toronto's Royal Conservatory of Music. There, he studied voice with famed oratorio baritones, George Lambert and Ernesto Vinci.

And here is a wonderful 'cheesy' video of the Three Crooners.

Bobby Darin On Andy Williams Live With Robert Goulet






Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
, , , , , ,

Sunday, September 23, 2007

Body Shop Loses Founder

Somehow the passing of Anita Roddick, the founder of Body Shop went without much notice in the progressive blogosphere. She was 64 and suffered from a brain hemorrhage a week ago, after discovering she had Hep C. She and her Body Shop were a modern version of Robert Owen in the age of globalization. She took campaigning for fair trade policies empowering farmers in the third world, to end animal testing, to support the Angola 3 in the U.S.

In fact she shared much in common with Owen.

Robert Owen (1771-1858), social and educational reformer, remains a controversial and enigmatic figure. Having profited enormously from enterprise in the early Industrial Revolution he set about trying to remedy its excesses through environmental, educational, factory and poor law reform. Synthesizing reformist ideas from the Age of Enlightenment and drawing on his own experience as an industrialist he constructed A New View of Society (1816), a rallying call for widespread social change, with education at its core. New Lanark, the test-bed for his ideas, became internationally famous.


She will be sadly missed. As they say success breeds success and her making Body Shop not just a business but a global effort to ameliorate the worst excesses of capitalism for this she will be remembered and her organization will continue to contribute to the betterment of humanity.

Those on the right who dis fair trade continue to miss the point that Anita and other Owenite capitalists have always made, capitalism is supposed to make life better for people. The right wing of course espouses this theory, a hand up instead of a hand out, but of course that is just a platitude to justify rapacious speculative casino capitalism.

Anita is one of many capitalists who used their business acumen to do just that to use their wealth to aid in social development and not just to make more money for its own sake. That was what made her wealthy, the good works she did, not the money in her bank account.

Dame Anita Roddick
Dame Anita brought ethically-sourced products to the High Street
Founder of ethical cosmetics firm Body Shop, Dame Anita Roddick, has died at the age of 64.

Her family said in a statement she suffered "a major brain haemorrhage" at 1830 BST at St Richard's Hospital in Chichester, West Sussex.

Her husband, Gordon, and daughters Sam and Justine were all with her.

Dame Anita set up the first Body Shop in Brighton in 1976. She pioneered cruelty-free beauty products and turned them into a highly profitable business.

In February she announced she had contracted Hepatitis C from a blood transfusion in 1971.

She had been taken to hospital on Sunday evening after she collapsed complaining of a headache.



The founder of the Body Shop, famous for her determination to combine social campaigning with business success, has a new mission. Facing her own battle against liver disease, she's determined to win this fight, too

Anita Roddick embarked on a new campaign last week - in an intensely personal fashion. Rather than watching the creator of the Body Shop talking aloe vera with Guatamalan tribes, we are now witnessing her as the campaign chief for hepatitis C. She was diagnosed with the disease three years ago, but decided to go public as her health worsened; she has cirrhosis of the liver and will need a transplant.

her new mission to rid the UK of its 'air of indifference' towards hepatitis has all the hallmarks of a classic Roddick campaign. For starters, she wants to know why the government spends £40m a year promoting the switch from analogue to digital television and just £2m on her disease. It's another example of Roddick turning personal questions into political activism.

The Body Shop was famously born out of pure necessity of supporting two children during Gordon's equine adventure. In 1975, Roddick began cooking up moisturisers from Bedouin recipes in her Brighton kitchen, opening her first shop in the Lanes in 1976.

She once said: 'How can you ennoble the spirit when you are selling something as inconsequential as a face cream?' But there was a certain inevitability that the young woman who blagged a £2,000 bank loan pitching up in a Bob Dylan T-shirt would end up retailing soap from her soapbox.

In 1985, Roddick used the shop windows of her by-now burgeoning Body Shop business to promote Greenpeace's Save the Whales campaign. It was the first explicit tie-in between products and causes. Mango butter, jojoba cleanser and brazil nut conditioner were to become inextricably entwined over the next decade with staving off destruction of the rainforest, preserving the Human Rights Act, resisting nuclear power, sticking two fingers up at corporate greed and promoting pacifism.

Roddick is routinely considered to be the originator of almost all the different facets of ethical consumption and business, but she was certainly an important pioneer of fair trade in the UK. Instead of buying ingredients such as brazil nuts for shampoo from commodity markets, she went straight to the source and set up development projects all over South America and Africa. The overriding message was that a business could be good and consumers could be a force for change. 'If Anita can whip up an empire, you can too,' ran a Body Shop slogan of the time.


More than three decades later, the company has around 2,000 stores in 50 countries; it was bought by France’s L’Oreal Group in March 2006. Roddick claims on the company’s Web site, “I haven’t a clue how we got here.”

The Body Shop’s success has stemmed from the growing numbers of middle-class, ethically conscious people who pine for organic food and Fair Trade products, along with a combination of first-mover advantage and consistency in branding and reputation.

There was some anger from Roddick’s admirers last year when the Body Shop was acquired by L’Oreal. Many feared the company’s standards would be compromised, and that the $204 million return for her and her husband’s 18% stake suggested Roddick was abandoning her by-then iconic business.

But she defended the decision, saying that “the campaigning, being a maverick, changing the rules of business. It's all there, protected. It's not going to change – that's part of our DNA." (See: “ Roddick Promises No 'Selling Out' In L'Oreal Sale”)

Earlier this year, she wrote in Newsweek that she had sold the Body Shop so that she could dedicate her time to radical causes; she also said that she regretted taking the company public in 1984 because it had led to a loss of some control.

After selling the business but staying on as an arms-length consultant, Roddick turned her back on the world of commerce and focused on giving away her more than $100 million fortune to charity – saying she didn’t want to die rich – and campaigning.

Up until Sept. 7, she regularly updated her blog, anitaroddick.com, focusing on developments in human rights and globalization, an area where she said the developing world had been grossly shortchanged.

Roddick viewed her illness with characteristic aplomb: “Many people have spoken of my ‘bravery’ in going public with my illness – pish. It shouldn’t take bravery to live life openly despite illness, although our developed world, with its deep fear and denial of mortality, often demands it.”

Aside from the frank expression of her beliefs, Roddick will be remembered for having helped reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable: commerce and social activism. Though the latter seemed to clearly be where her heart was, she still managed to cultivate a phenomenally successful business and become a millionaire, while reminding everyone that, “businesses have the power to do good.”


Comments on Anita and her impact are posted on her website.

The image “http://www.anitaroddick.com/highlights/6652_anita_young.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Help Support One of Anita's Charities


Dame Anita Roddick, our
founder, has died at the age of 64. She died at St Richard's Hospital in Chichester, West Sussex, where her husband, Gordon, and daughters Sam and Justine were all with her.

"All of us in The Body Shop family are deeply shocked and saddened to hear the news about Anita's passing away. Anita was not only our Founder but she was also the heart and passion of The Body Shop and with her we achieved so much, whether on animal rights, human rights, Community Trade, or through the founding of organisations like Children on the Edge. It is no exaggeration to say that she changed the world of business with her campaigns for social and environmental responsibility. But for everyone who knew Anita, it was about much more than that: you couldn't help but be inspired by her love of life, her vision of the world and her passion for changing it. Anita leaves us with an enduring legacy which will long guide the affairs of The Body Shop. Our heartfelt condolences are with the Roddick family at this sad time."

Adrian Bellamy
Chairman, The Body Shop, Canada
Anita-memoriam


Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,



Mime Silenced

There is an eternal silence in the world of Theatre today.

Good night gentle clown.

Marcel Marceau, Famed French Mime, Dies


Marcel Mangel (March 22, 1923 – September 22, 2007), better known by his stage name Marcel Marceau, was a well-known mime, among the most popular representatives of this art form world-wide. He was said to be "single-handedly responsible for reviving the art of mime after World War II."

Mime originated out of the old folk pagan traditions of clowning and mummery, which are still alive in Newfoundland and once were practiced by the Ukrainian diaspora community in Western Canada.

The performance of pantomime originates at its earliest in ancient Greece; the name is taken from a single masked dancer called Pantomimus evolved. It was , although performances were not necessarily silent. In Medieval Europe, early forms of mime such as mummer plays and later dumbshowsJean-Gaspard Deburau in early nineteenth century Paris who solidified the many attributes that we have come to know in modern times -- the silent figure in whiteface
Clowning around is joyful anarchy.


Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
, , , , , ,

Sunday, September 09, 2007

Alex RIP

You may have seen Alex on TV. That is where I first came across him.

He provided evidence that animals are not dumb.

And he gave new meaning to bird brained.

The African Grey Parrot is a medium-sized parrot of the genus Psittacus native to Africa, and is considered one of the most intelligent birds. Pet owners often liken the experience of keeping an African Grey to that of raising a young child, not only because of the birds' intelligence, but also arising from the substantial time commitment which they require.

Sad! Alex the Grey Parrot, Dead at 31

Dr. Pepperberg purchased Alex from a Chicago pet store in June, 1977. He can label seven colors, is learning the alphabet and can count up to six objects. Alex is also working on identifying objects from photographs. Alex likes cardboard boxes, keychains, and corks.



Teaching an Avian Scholar


Here at the lab, we are often asked exactly how it is that
Alex is trained. Just as you would assume, Alex has
been taught using a strong language-based format. We
are careful to always use words in context when
speaking to Alex, Griffin, and Wart, and we constantly
label all actions and objects associated with their daily
lives. Objects we’re likely to speak about include
everything from food items to toys to favorite perches.
Common actions that are labeled include such activities
as making breakfast, taking a shower, giving a tickle, or
going back (which is the delightful way Alex asks to be
returned to his cage top).

We simply talk to the birds in a way that most people speak to human babies
and small children during their quest to acquire language. However, that is by
no means suggesting that meaningless baby talk is ever used with the lab parrots.
Rather, we use sentence frames as a way of inserting and stressing the label for
a single object in several different sentences.

For example, let’s say the target word might be ‘corn’. While offering corn to Alex,
we might say “Alex, would you like some corn?” and “Did you notice the corn is
yellow?” and “Corn tastes yummy.”

The practice of using such sentence frames combined with consistently labeling
everyday objects and actions has greatly aided in Alex’s vocabulary development.
However, we use actual training sessions to teach Alex the necessary things he
needs to know for the research work.

Alex (1976 - 2007)

Category: Animal Behavior
Posted on: September 8, 2007 3:54 PM, by Coturnix

It is not unusal to write an obituary when a great scientist passes away. It is much more unusual to do so when a lab animal does so. But when that animal is not just an experimental subject, but also a friend, colleague, teacher and collaborator, than the species boundaries lose importance. And Alex, the famous African Grey Parrot, was just that, and more, to Irene Pepperberg and to the entire field of cognitive ethology. He died yesterday, unexpectedly, at the age of 31 (about half the normal life expectancy for the species) and he will be sorely missed. You can send donations, that will assure the research goes on with Alex's younger buddies Griffin and Wart, to the Alex Foundation.


Repost: The Story of Alex

Category: Friday Grey Matters
Posted on: September 8, 2007 4:52 PM, by Shelley Batts

This is a repost from July of 2006. I thought it was appropriate, given Alex's passing. Please check out Friday Grey Matters in my archives for many more reports on Dr. Pepperberg's work with Alex.

alex%201.bmp

Alex is a 28-year-old African Grey parrot who lives in the lab of Irene Pepperberg, in Brandeis University, and is the eqivalent of a superstar in the bird world. Long ago, Dr. Pepperberg chose Alex at a pet store as neither an exceptional nor sub-par bird. Through the years, Dr. Pepperberg has engaged Alex in a complex form of communication, where, much like a parent teaching a child, Alex is taught the proper "name" for an object. Now, he can label more than 100 items, including seven colors, five shapes, counting up to six, and three categories (color, shape, material of an object). This is amazing when you consider that this bird is working with a brain the size of a walnut! In addition, Alex has learned to ask for an item he wants. When the incorrect item is brought, he will either ignore it, or throw it at the person! :) He has learned to say "no" if an item is incorrect, and to tell his handlers when he wants to go back to his cage, or come out.

Here's an example of a test that Dr. Pepperberg might present to Alex: seven items on a tray, of differing colors and shapes. She asks "What shape is green and wood?" (This is the way to ask what is the shape of the object which is green and made of wood?) Amazingly, Alex answers correctly over 80% of the time. This is obviously far more than chance, and operant conditioning also cannot account for it as he answers the same, even to novel researchers. The content of the question, and answer, is understood by this bird. She also might ask, "How many wood?" (How many objects on the tray are made of wood?) He looks at the tray for a few seconds, and then answers with a number, again correct 80% of the time! He can replicate this up to six items.

Alex has also "coined" words, or made up new words to use for unfamilar objects. An example of this is when he first encountered an apple. He already knew the word for "banana" and "strawberry, " and the first time he saw an apple he called it a "bananaberry." This was hypothesized to be because an apple was red like a strawberry by white inside like a banana, so Alex put the two words together to make a new word! He has done this several times, like calling an almond a "cork nut" because of the nut's texture like a cork. He can be inventive and creative.

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
, , , , , ,

Saturday, April 14, 2007

Baudrillard RIP

I don't know how I missed this but Jean Baudrillard the French artist / philosopher of post modernism and critical theory, passed on last month. And this journal of International Baudrillard Studies is published in Canada at Lakehead University.

Jean Baudrillard. July 27, 1929 – March 6, 2007


My favorite work of his remains the Mirror of Production. An excerpt is here.

Baudrillards work on critical theory, Cultural Studies and the radical critique of post modern capitalism as alienation can be found in this hypertext document;
Streamed Capitalism: Marx on the New Capitalist Axiomatic

Another Canadian journal that focuses on Baudrillard's work is C-Theory

For a critical analysis of Baudrillard check out the Pinocchio Theory blog.


ISSN: 1705-6411

Volume 1, Number 1 (January 2004)

This is the Fourth World War: The Der Spiegel Interview With Jean Baudrillard

Interview Translated by Dr. Samir Gandesha
(Simon Fraser University)

Introduction by Dr. Gary Genosko
(
Canada Research Chair in Technoculture Studies, Lakehead University).

I. Introduction: Have You Seen the War?

Maximally amplified and multiplied across the networked screens of a globalized world, another war against Iraq, conducted by another Bush, invades our TV rooms and entertainment centers. Like father like son, this war at first suggested a rerun, that television term for repetition, replay even reenactment, that is a virtual land unto itself where Family Feud is forever replayed; where robust markets are regained; where generals make good – not Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf (former top US commander reduced to reporting for NBC) and Tommy Franks - but General Motors, General Dynamics, General Electric, and the rest of the military industrial brass of the American megamachine.

Turn on your war processor at almost any time of day, or stumble upon any of the numerous ambient units in your everyday world of laundry mats, malls, bars, airports, gyms, and there it is, like a free sample or, better, a gift that programming appears to be. All war, all the time, if you want it.

Have you seen the war? Have you seen it through Tommy Franks’s media briefing television set in Qatar, a $250,000 Hollywood sound stage designed to deliver the forgettable one liner of the war’s early days: shock and awe, which now seems like a blurb for an adolescent fantasy. Have you seen the war in the poses of the “scud studs” of old - like recently fired-MSNBC reporter Peter Garnett, whose Live from Baghdad reports for CNN during the Gulf War were fictionalized – “made for” - TV; or the original stud himself, Arthur Kent, who has written a book about his lawsuit against NBC and evils of owner General Electric – or new, up-and-coming darlings of the mediascape. Top Guns, Scud Studs (and Studettes): these are now categories into which reporters are slotted.

But a new military media policy has emerged and with it, a new category has arisen: embedded (“in bed with”) reporters. That is, those select few, both American and foreign, covering the combat from the ranks of coalition forces. All the psycho-demographics are covered: MTV is embedded. So is Al-Jazeera. Proximity to the “events” and coalition personnel is thought to ease the passage into the real by providing a kind of contiguity, authenticity, situatedness – an anchor in the very thing upon which one is reporting. This recalls Baudrillard’s thesis that circulated concerning the Gulf War – the passage from the virtual to the real was stalled in the excess of preprogramming, scenario-heaviness, over processing of plans, and the war itself was deferred and its place taken from it (it wasn’t that the war did not take place but that it did not have a place). The substitute of real time was one result; like today, reality TV both conjures and dissuades the real with which it purports to deal. Proximity can burn: images of dead American and British soldiers were broadcast by Al Jazeera, and when they were picked up and rebroadcast in the US, were considered “contraband” by the Pentagon. By the same token, reports about US troop advances and Iraqi soldiers surrendering, from embedded CNN journalists, resulted in their expulsion from the country by Iraqi information officials, frustrated by the invasiveness of CNN. The real was violently close, too close, evidently, for anyone’s comfort zone.

You can try to see the war through the smudged window of a screen near you, a sticky surface to which it is easy to become glued. It was thought that an apt symbol of the 1991 Gulf War was a sea bird coated in oil, slowly dying on a beach. It was “what we all [were], before our screens, before this sticky and unintelligible event.” (Baudrillard, La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu 1991: 28) Shock and awe is a nighttime stage setting, best viewed from a distance as scenery through a feed from a stationary camera, with no human beings in the frame; Iraqi mobile, irregular and guerrilla tactics cannot be so easily brought into the crosshairs of a camera lens, and this is what makes them so offensive for American propagandists.

It is the screen to which we adhere, to the images and representations, tightly controlled and scripted and packaged for domestic consumption. Actual violence, the so-called “ugliness” of war, is deferred, or at least edited, at all costs; immateriality by mass mediation interrupts the passage to real materiality on the ground. Yet new strategies are constantly evolving to get viewers closer to the “action.” This does nothing to guarantee directness and access, simultaneous tele-presence, for there is no straight passage via television to the real. War reportage proliferates like reality TV scenarios – today the White House, tomorrow a restaurant, the queering of straights, the straightening of queers… Television is a great war processor, with its own dissuasive formats, programs, structures of power, editing, rhythms, signatures and framing devices. Even this argument about the deterrence of the real by TV virtuality has become just another story angle for self-promoting high-brow columnists. I am as guilty as the rest. The question is to what degree can this accommodation of the war’s hijacking by mass mediation allow for some creative, affirmative, counter-mobilization, an escape from this estrangement from the real and the maternal massage with which television placates us.

“I watch TV like everybody else. I’m just as dumb, no question about it,” the late activist-intellectual Félix Guattari confessed in an interview about the Gulf War (“Did You See the War?” In Soft Subversions 1996: 139). Guattari’s point was that no matter how dumb you were, no matter how much TV you watched, you would not have seen the war. You haven’t seen the war, have you? A fourth one is apparently underway.

II. This Is The Fourth World War: The Der Spiegel Interview with Baudrillard

Spiegel: Monsieur Baudrillard, you have described the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington as the “absolute event.” You have accused the United States, with its insufferable hegemonic superiority, for rousing the desire for its own destruction. Now that the reign of the Taliban has collapsed pitifully and Bin Laden is nothing more than a hunted fugitive, don’t you have to retract everything?

Baudrillard: I have glorified nothing, accused nobody, justified nothing. One should not confuse the messenger with his message. I have endeavored to analyze the process through which the unbounded expansion of globalization creates the conditions for its own destruction.

Spiegel: In the process, don’t you simply deflect attention from the fact that there are identifiable criminals and terrorists who are responsible for the attacks?

Baudrillard: Of course there are those who committed these acts, but the spirit of terrorism and panic reaches far beyond them. The Americans’ war is focused on a visible object, which they would like to destroy. Yet the event of September 11th, in all of its symbolism, cannot be obliterated in this manner. The bombing of Afghanistan is a completely inadequate, substitute action.

Spiegel: All the same, the United States has brought to an end a barbaric form of oppression and, in the process, has given the Afghani people an opportunity for a new, peaceful beginning. Or at least this is how your colleague, Bernard-Henri Lévy, sees it.

Baudrillard: The situation doesn’t appear to me as so unequivocal. Lévy’s triumphalism strikes me as strange. He treats B-52 bombers as if they were instruments of the world-spirit.

Spiegel: So there is no such thing as a just war?

Baudrillard: No, there’s always too much ambivalence. Wars are often begun in the name of justice, indeed this is almost always the official justification. Yet, while they themselves want to be so justified and are undertaken with the best of intentions, they normally don’t end in the manner in which their instigators had imagined.

Spiegel: The Americans have attained some unquestionable successes. Many Afghans are now able to hope for a better life.

Baudrillard: You wait and see. Not all the Afghani women have discarded their veils yet. Sharia is still in effect. Without a doubt, the Taliban Regime has been smashed. However, the network of the international terror organization, al-Qaida, still exists. And Bin Laden, dead or alive, has, above all, disappeared. This lends him a mythical power; he has achieved a certain supernatural quality.

Spiegel: The Americans would be successful only if they were able to present Bin Laden or his body on television?

Baudrillard: That would be a questionable spectacle, and he, himself, would continue to play the role of martyr. Such an exhibition would not necessarily demystify him. What is at issue is more than the control of a territory or a population or the disbanding of a subversive organization. The stakes have become metaphysical.

Spiegel: Why can’t you simply accept that the destruction of the World Trade Center was an arbitrary, irrational act of blind fanatics?

Baudrillard: A good question, but, even if it were a matter of addressing the catastrophe in-itself, it would still have symbolic meaning. Its fascination can only be explained in this way. Here something happened that far exceeded the will of the actors. There is a general allergy to an ultimate order, to an ultimate power, and the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center embodied this in the fullest sense.

Spiegel: Thus, you explain terroristic delusion as the unavoidable reaction against a system which has itself become megalomaniacal?

Baudrillard: With its totalizing claim, the system created the conditions for this horrible retaliation. The immanent mania of globalization generates madness, just as an unstable society produces delinquents and psychopaths. In truth, these are only symptoms of the sickness. Terrorism is everywhere, like a virus. It doesn’t require Afghanistan as its home base.

Spiegel: You suggest that globalization and resistance to it is like the course of an illness, even to the point of self-destruction. Is this not what is particularly scandalous about your analysis-that it completely leaves morality out?

Baudrillard: In my own way, I am very much a moralist. There is a morality of analysis, a duty of honesty. That is to say, it is immoral to close one’s eyes to the truth, to find excuses, in order to cover up that which is difficult to bear. We must see the thing beyond the opposition of good and bad. I seek a confrontation with the event as it is without equivocation. Whoever is unable to do that, is led to a moral falsification of history.

Spiegel: But if the terrorist act takes place as a form of compulsion or fate, as you claim, is it not then at the same time exculpated? There is no longer a morally responsible subject.

Baudrillard: It is clear to me that the conceptual nature of my analysis is doubled-edged. Words can be turned against me. However, I do not praise murderous attacks - that would be idiotic. Terrorism is not a contemporary form of revolution against oppression and capitalism. No ideology, no struggle for an objective, not even Islamic fundamentalism, can explain it.

Spiegel: But why should globalization turn against itself, why should it run amok, when, after all, it promises freedom, well-being and happiness for all?

Baudrillard: That is the utopian view, the advertisement more or less. Yet there is altogether no positive system. In general all the positive historical utopias are extremely murderous, as fascism and communism have shown.

Spiegel: Surely you cannot compare globalization with the bloodiest systems of the 20th century.

Baudrillard: It is based, as colonialism was earlier, on immense violence. It creates more victims than beneficiaries, even when the majority of the Western world profits from it. Naturally the United States, in principle, could liberate every country just as it has liberated Afghanistan. But what kind of peculiar liberation would that be? Those so fortunate would know how to defend themselves even with terror if necessary.

Spiegel: Do you hold globalization to be a form of colonialism, disguised as the widening of Western civilization?

Baudrillard: It is pitched as the endpoint of the Enlightenment, the solution to all contradictions. In reality, it transforms everything into a negotiable, quantifiable exchange value. This process is extremely violent, for it cashes out in the idea of unity as the ideal state, in which everything that is unique, every singularity, including other cultures and finally every non-monetary value would be incorporated. See, on this point, I am the humanist and moralist.

Spiegel: But don’t universal values such as freedom, democracy, and human rights also establish themselves through globalization?

Baudrillard: One must differentiate radically between the global and the universal. The universal values, as the Enlightenment defined them, constitute a transcendental ideal. They confront the subject with its own freedom, which is a permanent task and responsibility, not simply a right. This is completely absent in the global, which is an operational system of total trade and exchange.

Spiegel: Rather than liberating humanity, globalization only in turns reifies it?

Baudrillard: It pretends to liberate people, only to deregulate them. The elimination of all rules, more precisely, the reduction of all rules to laws of the market is the opposite of freedom-namely, its illusion. Such out-dated and aristocratic values such as dignity, honesty, challenge and sacrifice no longer count for anything.

Spiegel: Doesn’t the unrestricted recognition of human rights build a decisive bulwark against this alienating process?

Baudrillard: I think that human rights have already been integrated into the process of globalization and therefore function as an alibi. They belong to a juridical and moral superstructure; in short, they are advertising.

Spiegel: Therefore mystification?

Baudrillard: Is it not a paradox that the West uses as a weapon against dissenters the following motto: Either you share our values or…? A democracy asserted with threats and blackmail only sabotages itself. It no longer represents the autonomous decision for freedom, but rather becomes a global imperative. This is, in effect, a perversion of Kant’s categorical imperative, which implies freely chosen consent to its command.

Spiegel: So the end of history, the absolute sway of democracy, would be a new form of world dictatorship?

Baudrillard: Yes, and it is completely inconceivable that there would be no violent counter-reaction against it. Terrorism emerges when no other form of resistance seems possible. The system takes as objectively terrorist whatever is set against it. The values of the West are ambivalent, at a definite point in time they could have a positive effect and accelerate progress, at another, however, they drive themselves to such extremes that they falsify themselves and ultimately turn against their own purpose.

Spiegel: If the antagonism between globalization and terrorism in reality is irresolvable, then what purpose could the War Against Terrorism still have?

Baudrillard: US President Bush aspires to return to trusted ground by rediscovering the balance between friend and foe. The Americans are prosecuting this war as if they were defending themselves against a wolf pack. But this doesn’t work against viruses that have already been in us for a long time. There is no longer a front, no demarcation line, the enemy sits in the heart of the culture that fights it. That is, if you like, the fourth world war: no longer between peoples, states, systems and ideologies, but, rather, of the human species against itself.

Spiegel: Then in your opinion this war cannot be won?

Baudrillard: No one can say how it will all turn out. What hangs in the balance is the survival of humanity, it is not about the victory of one side. Terrorism has no political project, it has no finality; though it is seen as real, it is absurd.

Spiegel: Bin Laden and the Islamists do indeed have a social project, an image of a rigorous, ideal community in the name of Allah.

Baudrillard: Perhaps, but it is not religiosity that drives them to terrorism. All the Islam experts emphasize this. The assassins of September 11th made no demands. Fundamentalism is a symptomatic form of rejection, refusal; its adherents didn’t want to accomplish anything concrete, they simply rise up wildly against that which they perceive as a threat to their own identity.

Spiegel: Yet this doesn’t change the fact that in the course of history cultural evolution takes place. Doesn’t the global expansion of Western culture demonstrate the power of its appeal?

Baudrillard: Why not also say its superiority? Cultures are like languages. Each is incommensurable, a self-contained work of art for itself. There is no hierarchy of languages. One cannot measure them against universal standards. It is theoretically possible for a language to assert itself globally, however, such reduction would constitute an absolute danger.

Spiegel: For all intents and purposes, you refuse the idea of moral progress. The unique, which you defend, is in itself not a value at all. It can be good or evil, selfless or criminal…

Baudrillard: Yes, singularity can assume all forms, including the vicious or terroristic. It remains all the same an artwork. For the rest, I don’t believe that there are predominantly good or evil cultures-there are, of course, disastrous diversions, but it is not possible to separate the one from the other. Evil does not retreat in proportion to the advance of the good. Therefore the concept of progress is, outside of the rationality of the natural sciences, in fact, problematic. Montaigne said: “If the evil in men were eliminated, then the fundamental condition of life would be destroyed.”

Spiegel: No heaven without hell, no redemption with out perdition-isn’t your dualistic view of the world nothing more than pessimism and fatalism?

Baudrillard: Fatalism offers an unpalatable interpretation of the world, for it leads to resignation. I don’t resign myself, I want clarity, a lucid consciousness. When we know the rules of the game, then we can change them. In this respect, I am a man of the Enlightenment.

Spiegel: But your knowledge of evil doesn’t lead you to combat it.

Baudrillard: No, for me that is senseless. Good and evil are irresolvably bound up with one another, this is fatal in the original sense: an integral part of our fate, our destiny.

Spiegel: Why does Western culture find it so difficult to tolerate the existence of evil, why is it repressed and denied?

Baudrillard: Evil was interpreted as misfortune, for misfortune can be combated: poverty, injustice, oppression and so on. This is the humanitarian view of things, the pathetic and sentimental vision, the permanent empathy with the wretched. Evil is the world as it is and as it has been. Misfortune is the world as it never should have been. The transformation of evil into misfortune is the most lucrative industry of the twentieth century.

Spiegel: While evil cannot be exorcized, misfortune can be made good, it demands a better condition.

Baudrillard: Misfortune is a mine whose ore is inexhaustible. Evil, in contrast, can’t be subdued by any form of rationality. This is the illusion of the West: because technological perfection seems within reach, one believes by extension in the possibility of realizing moral perfection, in an future free of contingencies in the best of all possible worlds. Everything should be redeemed-which is what comprises the contemporary ideal of our democracy. Everything will be genetically manipulated in order to attain the biological and democratic perfection of the human species.

Spiegel: Do you regret that the West has lost its belief in redemption through God?

Baudrillard: You know, in reality one would have to turn the whole debate on its head. The exciting question is not why there is evil. First there is evil, without question. Why is there good? This is the real miracle.

Spiegel: Could you explain it without reference to God?

Baudrillard: In the eighteenth century, Rousseau and others tried, but not very convincingly. The best and simplest hypothesis is, in effect, to postulate God. God is like democracy: the least corrupt and therefore the best of all possible solutions.

Spiegel: When one hears you, it is possible to conclude that you would have been a Cathar in the Middle Ages.

Baudrillard: Oh yes, I love the world of the Cathars because I am Manichaean.

Spiegel: … of the opinion that there is an eternal opposition between light and night, good and evil …

Baudrillard: … yes, the Cathars held the material world to be evil and bad, created by demons. At the same time, they put their faith in God, the holy and the possibility of perfection. This is a much more radical view than that which sees in evil only the gradually diminishing auxiliaries of the good.

Spiegel: Monsieur Baudrillard, thank you for this interview.


See:

Habermas

100 years of the Avante Garde 1905 2005

Oriental Origins of Post modernism

Deconstructing International Relations


Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
, , , , , , , , , , , , ,